Pussy Riot Members Sent To Siberian Prison Camps

The two members of Pussy Riot still in custody have been sent to Siberian prison camps to serve the rest of their sentences, according to The Guardian. Maria Alyokhina will spend the remainder of her two-year sentence in Perm, a region noted for the number of gulag prison camps it hosted during the Soviet Union years, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has been sent to Mordovia, a similarly infamous region. The band’s families and supporters have lobbied to allow the two women to serve out their time in Moscow to be close to their children, Alyokhina’s five-year-old son Filipp and Tolokonnikova’s four-year-old daughter Gera.

The anti-Putin punk band’s other members posted the news on Twitter on Monday. The third Pussy Riot member arrested after the band’s protest performance in a Moscow cathedral in February, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released on a suspended sentence earlier in October. The precise camps to which Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova have been sent remain unknown, and prison authorities have declined to comment on the women’s location.